CenturyLink Eases Cloud Foundry Deployments

CenturyLink embraces Bosh software support from Tier3 acquisition, aims for a greater piece of the PaaS pie owned by Amazon, Microsoft, Google.

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CenturyLink, a telco cloud service supplier, is capitalizing on its acquisition of Tier3 to better compete with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google in the race to attract developers. Developer activity tends to produce repeat cloud business. Some would even say vendors must attract developers or die.

EngineYard, Heroku, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, and Google have already demonstrated their chops in platform-as-a-service. Now CenturyLink is making it easy to launch a version of the Cloud Foundry developer's platform on its CenturyLink Cloud.

CenturyLink now supports Bosh, open-source software that makes it simpler to deploy Cloud Foundry, PaaS sponsored by VMware. Bosh is another open-source project that grew out of the original Cloud Foundry effort; it's sponsored by Pivotal, the spinoff from VMware and EMC. Tier3 supported Cloud Foundry implementation using Bosh on its provisioning site before it was acquired by CenturyLink in November; now CenturyLink is doing the same thing. It can provide a copy of the Bosh command line, familiar to its users, in its Micro-Bosh server, which in turn will deploy a ready-to-go version of Cloud Foundry. One restriction: the Micro-Bosh server works only with Ubuntu Linux.

Bosh agents can go out to the Cloud Foundry project site and grab components that can be configured together. Once assembled, the development platform can be deployed by Bosh to Amazon Web Services' EC2, an OpenStack cloud, or a VMware vCloud or vSphere environment, said Jared Wray, former CTO of Tier3 and now CTO of CenturyLink's cloud unit.

Jared Wray

Wray started Iron Foundry, an effort within Cloud Foundry to bring Microsoft's .Net technologies into the open-source project. It initially focused on open source languages, such as Ruby and PHP. Wray and Tier3 are regarded as having the developer insights needed for a successful Cloud Foundry deployment. Support for Bosh in CenturyLink Cloud is in beta, with full support to follow later this year.

Iron Foundry became the second largest project (other than Cloud Foundry itself) as the PaaS software was developed. Cloud Foundry "is still a young product. But because of our roots around Cloud Foundry, a lot of customers see us as experts in implementing it," Wray said in an interview.

There is no charge to use the beta version of Micro-Bosh on CenturyLink Cloud. Wray said its use will lead to more cloud applications and likely more workload deployments on CenturyLink.

CenturyLink charges 11 cents per hour for a virtual server with a CPU with up to 2 GHz of processing power and up to 128 GB of RAM; disk storage and networking are extra.

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CenturyLink recently announced that they are deploying RedHat's OpenShift PaaS on premise. An interesting choice given their recent acquistions of Tier3 and Appfog. As CenturyLink's John Liptak, principal architect, puts it "Red Hat's open source technologies allowed us to solve problems with a real understanding of what is available to us rather than just taking a vendor's sales pitch."

Having a complete working solution built across an entire open source eco-system with an enterprise like Red Hat backing it with Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®, Red Hat JBoss® Web Server, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat JBoss Operations Network, OpenShift Enterprise by Red Hat, Red Hat JBoss Fuse, Red Hat Consulting, and Red Hat Training - appears to be more important than just open sourcing a few pieces of the solution.

For cloud computing era, as a cloud service provider the most important thing is to attrack more developers and partners instead of working in your own silo. The ecosystem is much more important compared to technology itself. You need to have a healthy ecosystem composed of developers, partners and the representative from user community. Ohterwise, your cloud offerings may not survive for long.

Why would anyone need this if Cloud Foundry is available as a public cloud service, on Amazon Web Services to be exact? A spokesman for Pivotal tells me, "The majority of development on Cloud Foundry today is happening in a company's private infrastructure. Although we have not released exact numbers to date, we know that in terms of subscribers we have roughly a 70% - 30% split; 70% on-premise, and 30% in public cloud." Any one using Cloud Foundry on premises who's interested in a Bosh assist?

There's no doubt Google has made headway into businesses: Just 28 percent discourage or ban use of its productivity ­products, and 69 percent cite Google Apps' good or excellent ­mobility. But progress could still stall: 59 percent of nonusers ­distrust the security of Google's cloud. Its data privacy is an open question, and 37 percent worry about integration.